14 DAY TRIAL // Corporate networks have seen a rise in cyber-attacks during 2015, with Kaspersky reporting that 58% of all corporate PCs have been the target of at least one malware attack this year, up from 55% in 2014.
The report shows that the tools used to target businesses have been very different from those used for regular users, cyber-criminals often opting to employ digital certificates to pass their malware as legitimate programs on infected corporate computers, a trick less used when infecting ordinary home users.
Office software has been the source of most infections
Most of the times, attackers have used office-related software to launch attacks on business computers, three times more often than with regular end users.
One of each three (29%) attacks launched on corporate networks has been carried out via the Internet while 41% of business computers have faced attacks fired from local networks or infected portable storage devices.
2015 has arguably been the year of ransomware, with numerous new families popping up online, arrests of ransomware operators, many ransomware distribution infrastructures brought down, and ransomware spreading and evolving into a dangerous threat on mobile devices.
Businesses have gained more attention from ransomware operators
Corporate networks weren't spared from this trend, especially after cyber-criminals learned pretty quickly that it's highly more likely that a business would pay a ransom to get its files back when compared to a regular home user.
Kaspersky reports that, after it saw over 24,000 ransomware infections on corporate PCs in 2014, this number has more than doubled in 2015, telemetry data from its security products showing that over 51,000 business workstations have gotten locked with ransomware during 2015.
"Because the evidence shows that cybercriminals don’t always honor the agreement once the ransom has been paid [...] many of those affected should call in law enforcement and computer security experts," says Yury Namestnikov, Senior Security Researcher at Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab.
Besides corporate computers, Kaspersky also reports a 7% rise in malware attacks targeting Android devices.
